>The law - sensibly enough - didn't allow politicians to interfere in the running of the companies so they were basically unaccountable. I'm not sure how that'

>The law - sensibly enough - didn't allow politicians to interfere in the running of the companies so they were basically unaccountable. I'm not sure how that's sensible. Are you being sarcastic? Sure, there are problems with political intervention in state-owned companies (near term bias, etc.), but if it's the only means of holding state-owned companies accountable, and if a competitive market is untenable, then yes, voter-accountable politicians should be able to intervene in state-owned companies. As it stands, with a company like PG&E, you have a half-solution, where it's a privately-owned monopoly but isn't directly accountable to its customers because they can't vote with their wallet, so it gets metric tons of regulation dumped on it instead as a half-measure that (obviously) doesn't work.